Any early public release of all the data would most likely result in lots of junk preprints as people saw badly-understood detector effects and called them new physics — if CDF II had just gone and immediately published the four-vectors rolling out of its reconstruction software, I’m sure someone would have noticed a huge excess of monojet+missing energy events.

For example, Einstein originally formulated special relativity in language that now seems clumsy, and it was mathematician Hermann Minkowski’s introduction of four-vectors and spacetime that made further progress possible.